Capital, Bureaucracy, and Overdetermination

It's one funky, nasty brew

California pharmacies need to be held to account

But first, a little detour.

Caveat:

By the way, I am not a philosophy professor and I am only explaining overdetermination as it applies in one specific setting. I do not claim to be an expert on the subject or how it is used in other fields of study. I’m only giving a very simple working definition of an idea and its salience in this context. I have no desire to get into a debate about Freud or Althusser.

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This morning, I was speaking to my sister about US automakers and how they outsource their work to get around paying for employee healthcare. They farm it out to Canadians who DO have healthcare and we could do this in the US if our congress was not bought and sold ten times over.

That’s the simple cause-and-effect explanation, the sharpest of Occam’s razors and nearest within reach. However, what we are truly looking at is an externality: unemployed US auto workers are experiencing the reality of “overdetermination,” as Marxists would put it. The term was originated by Freud as a means of explaining dreams, which are the result of the infinitude of things that may have happened during that day, the previous week, the last month, or maybe years ago in the dreamer’s life. In fact, dreams may be a result of any number of things from across the dreamer's entire lifespan.

So the surface truth and objective reality is that car makers don’t want to pay health care costs. But the reason we’ve gotten to this point is the result of countless other phenomena.

The question to ask is, “Why are they focusing on healthcare costs and the industry’s desire to avoid paying for insurance?”

Overdetermination is another way of explaining things beyond searching for a single cause and its unfortunate effect. It tells us that things happen because a huge totality of phenomena are occurring, rubbing against and bouncing off one another, and influencing outcomes. These complex webs of multiple causes and effects are an outgrowth of capitalism. In reality, there are infinite causes for the unfortunate effects that make life unpleasant under this system.

For example, we need a huge police apparatus to protect and safeguard private wealth, but then because of that, we require a gargantuan network of prisons to house the people arrested by the police. Congressional representatives, who know that prisons are a source of employment, make new proposals to build even more dungeons, and now, we are the largest penal colony on the planet. Inside the prison, clandestine economies emerge so that prisoners can continue to buy drugs and weapons as capitalists propose building even more prisons because they are a source of free labor. The people funneling in the drugs often get arrested and afterward, when inside, they further facilitate the commerce. The people locked up were already using the drugs they used on the outside to cope with a systemically racist country and an unfair criminal justice system, so the demand for dope will always be there. Others, who were perhaps never addicited, turn to drugs inside to be able to cope with the sociopathic hell that is the American prison system.

So why are there drugs in prison? Where do you start? There’s an infinite web of cause-and-effect relationships in constant flux, and we must take this into account before we can even begin to answer the question.

Then we need an educational system that indoctrinates 24/7 so that kids don’t grow up wanting to change things. All of these realities influence other realities, ad infinitum. The material world, for those who recognize overdetermination, is the result of innumerable instances of colliding phenomena.

So a complete explanation of any phenomenon would be impossible, but when attempting to analyze, understand, and cohere, we still must look at a greater totality of causative agents and see them as part of a larger whole. Make no mistake, the problem I’m about to discuss is an outgrowth of an economic system whose main mantras are “Grow!” and “More!“

So why are they focusing on healthcare costs?

Start to ponder that, and the answer becomes more nuanced and complex. It involves congressional representatives and their relationships with the insurance industry. It involves lobbyists, Big Pharma, and re-election campaigns. It has to do with a nation that’s had worker rights systematically hollowed out for the last 75 years. Why, for example, can’t we give our citizens healthcare, which every sane person who’s read just a tiny bit knows is 100% doable, and let them build the cars here?

Because the profits will not be as obscenely high.

Again, that’s only one reason, but you get the picture. Now back to those brass tacks.

I couldn't get my prescription refilled today, and even though I am leaving town on Friday, the pharmacy is refusing to give it to me. CVS, whose front door is a portal to the Bizzaro World, said, flat-out, that they would not give it to me even one hour early on Friday night so that I could catch my flight and make an out-of-town job interview. I take suboxone for a massive bone tumor because opiates stopped being an effective treatment for my pain. After years of constant suffering, they put me on suboxone twice a day for long-term pain management and to avoid a nasty withdrawal. It works well for the pain and doesn’t get me wasted and I have never upped my dosage. Not once in three years.

Now here’s the traditional “cause” and explanation: The refill was done on the 12th of last month, but I didn’t pick it up until the 14th, so they are making me wait an extra day, until the 15th, before I can have it. The absurdity of this is almost beyond belief because the last time, they filled it four days in advance, which according to them is impossible. I showed them the bottle and they said “Duuuhhhhh…?”

Verbatim.

So taking overdetermination into account, what’s behind all this and how is it connected to a bigger, sloppier mess rooted in our political economy and the social relations it engenders?

The opioid crisis, the hillbilly heroin epidemic, or whatever you want to call it may again be the simplest and easiest way to explain the cause of my problem. But that’s not really at the root. At the root is what’s always at the root: a tangled knot of other roots. What did they do about the opioid crisis? What happened was that countless Americans found themselves unemployed or underpaid, struggling with a global economy that doesn't give two shits about them in a country that won’t give them adequate medical care or psychological help. The problem grew until it was out of control. We had thousands and thousands of people in deep spiritual despair and unable to get a job that accords them any modicum of dignity.

So liquor stores get robbed, people overdose, black market economies emerge, gun sales go through the roof, and politicians jump on the first bandwagon they see to ride some draconian drug policy all the way to re-election.

I got them Overdetermination Blues, for sure.

The problem exists because instead of confronting the complexities of the issue, instead of creating treatment centers and paying people a livable wage, instead of dealing with a myriad of root causes, they have a simple solution:

Make it impossible to get your meds

This is what the Democrats did after the first loss to Ubu Trump: In an attempt to provide cover for their graft, warmongering, corruption, and collusion against Bernie (a willing dupe), they concocted a simple, albeit dumb, narrative that blamed all of the evil in the known universe on the Orange Menace. Plus, a crypto-fascist blowhard like Trump is far more preferable, to the Dems at least, than Bernie or any other candidate seriously attempting to reintroduce any of the welfare state benefits that have been systematically disappeared by previous administrations, Red and Blue alike.

A simple solution for people simple enough to buy into it.

Brilliant. Now, another stellar piece of legislation means that 80-year-old ladies with acute rheumatoid arthritis have no way to fill their morphine prescriptions on time, and they’re too befuddled and fearful to argue back. They spend days in excruciating pain and pharmacists callously ignore them. I’ve seen it happen.

I wrote Senator Alex Padilla today and begged him and State Assemblyman Alex Lee to consider legislation to stop this seesawing back and forth from overly liberal to draconian policies. It would not be hard to institute a better set of regulations that are more humane and compassionate without being flat-out dangerous. I am going to organize a social media and email campaign to try to collect signatures and get a bill passed. It won’t be for a while, but if you’re willing to volunteer, I need people and you can DM me if you’re interested in helping.